An experiment with Codex

My vibe coding experiment ended in failure. My clippings blog was destroyed but not by Codex. The failure seems like it was due to the code to the support in blot.im for switching between git and dropbox which I did several times while I determined which was a better fit for Obsidian.

It turns out that, for this particular blog, editing in Obsidian was a poor choice. Headlines contain many characters that can’t be used in file names. Storing a clipping in the file system on any OS is just asking for trouble. Sure, you can munge headlines into file names but that is lossy. Dropping a question mark in a headline really does change the meaning.

Fortunately, I had my old blog post editing and generation in FileMaker as backup. I’m falling back to that.

(Aside: I suppose could do all this in Tinderbox as well, but FileMaker is rock solid and, despite my appreciation for it, Tinderbox is not.)

I’m convinced that vibe coding is practical for many applications if done carefully. For a much bigger example there is a vibe-coded implementation of the Pharo Smalltalk VM on the iPad that seems to be functioning reasonably well. See https://lists.pharo.org/empathy/thread/QVO55D7MBQLYRZECYROYTIWGQPM3AAV7.